On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 03:29:45PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
>
> dpkg knows nothing about available packages (as indicated in
> /var/lib/apt/lists/*Packages and /var/lib/dpkg/available). It knows
> only about the contents of /var/lib/dpkg/status -- the "installed
> packages" database.
dpkg must know about available packages since:
$ dpkg -l package-name-pattern
lists available packages (apparently from /var/lib/dpkg/available)
regardless of whether they're installed.
Therefore, it's a bit misleading that dpkg -l with no
package-name-pattern only lists installed packages.
So how is /var/lib/dpkg/available generated if not from apt?
The output of:
$ apt-cache dumpavail
has the same package info as /var/lib/dpkg/available.
I'm sure this can be elucidated by thoroughly reading the documentation
for dpkg and apt, but it's not readily obvious, and the man pages are
not specific enough.
-David
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